Whitley Award winner for Best Popular Zoology Book.

With his usual brilliance James Woodford, bestselling author of The Wollemi Pine, explores the wombat's bizarre evolutionary history and perilous future: a mere 65 northern hairy-nosed wombats remain in the wild.

But this book also tells the extraordinary story of Peter Nicholson, a schoolboy from Timbertop who in the 1960s learned more about the secret lives of these animals than anyone before him.

This is popular science writing at its best: an irresistible subject in the hands of an irrepressible author.

'Woodford has done the research, he has read widely, spoken with the major wombat pundits and with the lay observers. He has travelled to gain direct experience of all species...I know more about wombats than I did, and retain some stark images which I hope never to lose.' Sunday Age